The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Religion
The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)
Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Catherine, of Genoa, Saint, 1447-1510
(2) The fact is that, if man cannot apprehend the objects,--the
historic and other facts,--of Religion, without certain subjective
organs, dispositions, and effects, any more than can all these
subjective capacities, without those objects, produce religious
convictions and acts, or be waked up into becoming efficient forces:
neither can man thus experience and effect the deepest foundations and
developments of his own true personality in and through contact with
the divine Spirit, without being more or less stimulated into some
kind of, at least rudimentary, Philosophy as to these his profoundest
experiences of reality, and as to their rights and duties towards the
rest of what he is and knows.
(3) Indeed his very Religion is already, in itself, the profoundest
Metaphysical Affirmation. As the deeply historical-minded Prof. Tiele
admits: “Every man in his sound senses, who does not lead the life of
a half-dormant animal, philosophizes in his own way”; and “religious
doctrine rests on a metaphysical foundation; unless convinced of the
reality of a supersensual world, it builds upon sand.”[322] Or as Prof.
Eucken, the most eloquent champion of this central characteristic
of all vital religion, exclaims: “If we never, as a matter of fact,
get beyond merely subjective psychological processes, and we can
nowhere trace within us the action of cosmic forces; if we in no case
experience through them an enlargement, elevation, and transformation
of our nature: then not all the endeavours of its well-meaning friends
can preserve religion from sinking to the level of a mere illusion.
Without a universal and real principle, without hyper-empirical
processes, there can be no permanence for religion.”[323]
(4) Some kind of philosophy, then, will inevitably accompany, follow,
and stimulate religion, were it only as the, necessarily ever
inadequate, attempt at giving a fitting expression to the essentially
metaphysical character of belief in a super-sensible world, in God, in
man’s spiritual capacities and in God’s redemption of man. Not because
the patient analysis of the completer human personalities, (as these
are to be found throughout the length and breadth of history), requires
the elimination of a wholesome Mysticism and a sober Metaphysic from
among the elements and effects of the fullest Manhood and Religion; but
because of the ever serious difficulties and the liability to grave
abuses attendant upon both these forces, the inevitably excessive
reactions against these abuses, and the recurrent necessity of
remodelling much of the theory and practice of both, in accordance with
the growth of our knowledge of the human mind, (a necessity which, at
first sight, seems to stultify all the hyper-empirical claims of both
these forces): only because of this have many men of sense and goodness
come to speak as though religion, even at its fullest, could and should
get on without either, contenting itself to be a somewhat sentimental,
Immanental Ethics.
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